Well, Eric’s most recent post regaling his efforts to endure a lifetime conversion to linux made be decide to go back and try out Beryl. In the past, I have setup Compiz, which is kind of like Beryl but with fewer plugins and options.
At this point, both of them seem to be relatively similar, but I got Beryl working with the beta nvidia driver, which seems to be a lot more stable and snappier.
Unfortunately, linux is linux and the apps running the GUI are still as buggy as ever. I am not sure what got into me, but I spent about six hours screwing with stuff just to make it usable.
Yeah, I would say that linux is still several years off of having a viable desktop replacement offering. At least now the setup time is down from days to hours.
This is all for now, I am just trying out a blogging app for gnome, called BloGTK. It is very simple, but will hopefully work for the purpose I intend.
Also of note… jjafuller likes ubuntu/beryl better than darwin/macosx!
If ubuntu supported WPA2 out the box and my laptop had more ram I would give it a shot.
The beryl is pretty neat and I’m glad it has the expose stuff like OS X has using windows minus expose is tough.
Vanlandw you should try it on your laptop. it runs fine on my laptop with 256 megs of ram.
I never looked into wpa2 but i know it supports wpa
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WPAHowTo
Also, vanlandw… ubuntu can be installed on a mac. there is a ppc version.
Eric, ubuntu is not only not better than OS X, it isn’t even better than Windows.
Also, ubuntu does not support wpa2, only suse does.
Feh. I’ve been 100% linux for a few years, and even before that, windows only for gaming.
I could maybe see trying to forgo windows for linux, even though it dramatically slows down my productivity. However, Apple would really have to screw me over bad for me to stop using OS X.
I just scrapped a very long reply to your post, Jeff. In a nutshell: Feel free not to use it. However, you’re not giving it a fair chance. “Enduring the Torment of OSS” gives me a pretty good idea as to your attitude going in.
Suffice to say, my workstation installs (currently two laptops, two workstations) give me no problems except when there’s hardware problems. My server installs don’t have any problems (my personal laptop server is up 179 days) and app crashes hardly ever happen (except evolution, which sucks for MS Exchange email). I’d still like a Mac Mini, but I’d scrap OSX and put linux on it.
Adam, I meant to reply to this a long time ago, but haven’t had the time.
Anyway, I would say that I am giving it a pretty fair shake. Granted, my posts always come out of the frustrations I have, because the OS is so unpolished. I am not saying that it is unusable, I am saying that it takes a long time to get an install there.
Also, if you happen to read this, how the heck do you get suspend to work on a laptop? I can’t ever get it to wake up.
What kind of laptop? I have a gateway at work that does *not* suspend. My wife’s dell doesn’t suspend. However, my dell laptop (which used to be my web server) suspends just fine. In Ubuntu, I do System -> Quit -> Suspend.
However, suspend doesn’t always work for everybody. That’s not too polished. But otherwise, I find ubuntu quite polished… But I also work with it all day, every day.